


room is on fire (invisible smoke)

by thetaserpentis



Category: Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. (TV)
Genre: (i think), F/M, Fluff, Hurt/Comfort, Jemma Simmons Needs a Hug, Jemma Simmons-centric, Nightmares, POV Jemma Simmons, Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder - PTSD, Pre-Relationship, Season/Series 03, Whump
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-02-14
Updated: 2021-02-14
Packaged: 2021-03-15 00:35:49
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,766
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/29427525
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/thetaserpentis/pseuds/thetaserpentis
Summary: Now she wakes with the second half of a gasp on her lips. It takes her longer than it used to to realize that she is staring at her dark bedroom and not a gun held to her friends’ heads. Her heart pumps blood like she is still there though, and her eyes send her the images of her dreams- projects them against her dark ceiling like a flickering movie reel.ORWhen Jemma wakes in the middle of the night, there's one person she goes to.
Relationships: Leo Fitz & Jemma Simmons, Leo Fitz/Jemma Simmons
Comments: 6
Kudos: 35





	room is on fire (invisible smoke)

**Author's Note:**

> So I kind of wrote this in the span of three hours after I woke up from a nightmare. I guess that's the fun way to say there's no beta reader. All mistakes are mine! 
> 
> This fic pretty heavily delves into the romantic feelings Jemma has for Fitz. It is a Fitzsimmons fic, but it's very Jemma-centric. (Will is mentioned in passing like twice.) This story takes place in Season Three after Jemma's return but before Fitz learns about Will. I just want to make it clear that Jemma's sort of an unreliable narrator as far as understanding her relationship with Fitz or Fitz's motivations go. Long story short, we all know Jemma loves to feel guilty and self sabotage.
> 
> The title of this fic is from The Archer by Taylor Swift. Everyone go listen to Taylor Swift if you are not already currently listening to Taylor Swift. Stream Love Story (Taylor's Version). 
> 
> Thank you so much to everyone who clicked on this story and decided to give it a read!

Jemma thinks she misunderstands nightmares for someone who gets them so frequently. She always assumes they will be linear plotlines or painful flashbacks. Maybe she’ll dream about falling out of an airplane, but maybe this time the man who saved her lets her drown. Maybe she’ll dream about a terrifying circumstance where Daisy lies on a table cold and blue and Jemma can’t find the way to fix her. But it’s never quite like that. Her dreams seem to twist and turn and connect things she never would have thought of. It feels like walking backwards on a forward moving train, and her nightmares twist all her bad memories around until they are more terrifying than anything she could have thought of while conscious. 

She dreams about conversations she’s never had and memories she’s never made. At one point in her life, Jemma found her nightmares completely ineffectual. She would wake into her own reality where those things seemed impossible. But now Jemma dreams of Fitz getting swallowed by liquid rocks, choking on air, never leaving a hospital bed, buried six feet under. When she wakes up with new memories of getting ripped apart by an inhuman she didn’t know existed and getting cut into by a man she used to think was her friend, it all feels too real and too possible. 

She used to wake up and feel flooded with relief. She would continue her day without a second thought, because she knew she was living in a better reality, and she’d never have to return to those nightmares, and they’d never haunt her or hurt her again. 

Now she wakes with the second half of a gasp on her lips. It takes her longer than it used to to realize that she is staring at her dark bedroom and not a gun held to her friends’ heads. Her heart pumps blood like she is still there though, and her eyes send her the images of her dreams- projects them against her dark ceiling like a flickering movie reel. 

She texts Fitz and the messages deliver. It’s better than what she ever got on Maveth- sending messages and recording voice memos to never be received- but he doesn’t respond. She isn’t necessarily expecting him too; it’s late enough into the night to be considered morning. Her messages aren’t that out of the ordinary either. It’s simple enough. She says things like “I can’t sleep,” and “I had the worst nightmare.” Fitz would probably respond as soon as he woke up, or he’d come to her room in the morning. He’d say all the sweet, concerned things like “Do you want to talk about it?” and “Are you sure you’re okay?” She doesn’t want to wake him, but she doesn’t want to wait that long either. She wishes she could have that person to roll over to. She wants to twist onto her side- see someone there- know that she could wake them in the night and ask to be held, and it wouldn’t be a big deal. She thinks she had that with someone who saw her at her absolute lowest- someone who had been the last hope on a hellish planet. 

She thinks she might have that here too- or she could. She knows that if Fitz were already lying by her side, she wouldn’t hesitate to shake him awake, and she knows it would only take less than a moment of him near her to send her back to sleep. 

She doesn’t want to wake him, but the more she thinks about it, the more she’s convinced that she has to. There’s something about those unanswered messages that sends her heart stuttering. She knows Fitz is asleep. The base is quiet this time of night, save for the few agents left at security on the night shift, and there would be a commotion- sirens going off and agents yelling and heavy boots stomping- if there was any cause for concern. Jemma knows all this, but there are images and unmade memories flickering on Jemma’s ceiling, and she wants to see Fitz. 

It’s probably a selfish thing too. Jemma doesn’t think she’d mind the nightmares as much if they carried her through the course of the night, but she wakes within an hour with a lifetime of new memories. She never goes back to sleep afterwards, and she always goes to the lab with a pounding headache to get overstimulated and pretend she’s “doing better.” She wants to sleep, and she knows just seeing Fitz will help her do it. 

So she pads through the dimly lit hallways of the Playground with her feet stuffed into an old pair of sneakers. She hadn’t even bothered to find socks to put on, and she tries not to think about the way the torn up soles of her shoes press back up into the balls of her feet. She stands outside his door, tugs on the doorknob only to find that it’s locked. It’s a bit annoying, because Jemma had full intentions to check on him and leave, but it does save her the moral dilemma of invading his privacy. 

It gives her a different dilemma though- the original question of sorts. She looks at the smooth wooden door, follows the grain from the top to the bottom with her eyes, and she raises her hand to knock, but it never moves. Fitz has always been there for her in the past, and he never expressed any discomfort or unhappiness about having to deal with her, but Jemma knows it’s a chore more than anything else. He doesn’t really benefit from it in any way, and she wonders how many more tickets she can cash in before he grows tired of her. She wonders if she really wants to waste one on another nightmare. 

She thinks if she waits any longer she’ll turn around and leave, and that’s what spurs her on to rap her knuckles against his door. Her mind was already made up the second she stuffed her feet into those sneakers; she just didn’t know it yet until she tried to leave. She stares at the door, and she decides (really decides) that if Fitz doesn’t come to the door, she will leave. Surely, he must have not heard- is still asleep- or perhaps, Jemma had already used up all her tickets, and he’s pretending to sleep to keep his own sanity. Either way, Jemma wouldn’t blame him, and she’d leave. 

Jemma has half the mind to turn around and slam her forehead against the rough and jagged brick of the Playground’s walls, but then she hears the lock click. She tries to look less pathetic than she feels, but that’s the impossible task she’s been given ever since she returned. She’s knocked on his door at the dead of night, and she doesn’t think fixing her posture will help her case. 

The door creaks open slowly, and warm, yellow light floods the white light of the hallway. Fitz is standing there, and he looks familiar. It reminds Jemma of late study nights, movie marathons, sleepovers, and epiphanies. He’s older now though, and he looks the part. His hair is messy and untamed, but it is shorter than the curls he had at the Academy or Sci-Ops or on the Bus. He looks stronger too, but he also looks more tired. He looks sadder. Jemma feels sick to her stomach. She wishes she had never come here, but she knows there is no reality where she does anything else. 

“Jemma, you should be asleep.” 

“I _know_ ,” Jemma doesn’t mean for her voice to come out as snappy as it does. She is irritated by those comments though. Sometimes people had this false perception of her- that she was entirely self destructive and uncaring of the mess that she had become. They didn’t see how hard she was trying- didn’t realize that this is the best she can give. “I’m trying,” she says quieter this time. 

He rubs at his eyes, and he turns away for a brief second to look at his room before he looks at her again. It looks like he’s gone through a hard reset, because all of a sudden he remembers that she is fragile. “Yeah, course, sorry.” Jemma doesn’t think that she could feel more terrible, but she does. His comments and his gazes push her to the edge of tears, and it makes her heart seize up. She doesn’t want to be fragile. She wants to be strong for him, but her best attempts at it fall flat. 

“Um, come in,” he moves out of the doorway, and Jemma steps a foot into his bedroom. Fitz goes to his bedside, and Jemma sees him check his phone. He must read the texts she sent him. She doesn’t look to read his expression- it sounds like self torture- so Jemma takes extra care to turn and close the door as gently and slowly as she can. When the lock pops back into place, she looks back at him. He is more awake and alert now; he understands why she’s here. 

“Do you want to talk about it?” His voice sounds low and rough- the way it does when he’s especially tired. She knows he’s busier than her, taking on all the responsibilities Jemma couldn’t in the lab and having to handle her at the same time. She’s sorry to wake him up, but she doesn’t tell him that because it would only make him more sad on her behalf. Jemma’s always inflicting some type of pain on him, she’s learned, and she’s decided the only thing she can do is minimize the extent of that pain. What she can keep to herself she does. It’s the reason she hasn’t told him about the things she did on that other planet, and it’s the reason she shrugs off his question now. 

She doesn’t trust her voice at the moment, and she wouldn’t be able to find the right words anyways. She wonders then if Fitz could read her mind the same way he used to be able to when they were young and simple. She looks at him, sitting on the edge of his bed, staring right back at her, and he looks a little lost. She’s disappointed, but she doesn’t blame him. She doesn’t quite know how to read her own mind either. 

He doesn’t speak again, and he looks unsure of what to do and how to help. Jemma recognizes that feeling, and she knows that it feels like hell. She joins him on the bed, taking up the other side that he doesn’t occupy, and he follows her lead, sitting fully on the bed. “Can you get the light?” She whispers. She wants to make this easy for him. She wants to make it clear what she wants and what she came for, but she doesn’t know how to say it without making it seem like a demand. 

She sort of misses being a child. Comforting a crying child was like second nature to so many people, and Jemma wishes she could make them see that she felt just as small and helpless as she did at four. She misses running to her parents’ bedroom and watching them breathe until one of them would notice her presence. They would jump awake, and they would say “Christ, Jemma. You scared me.” And Jemma would only start to cry then, and she would say, “I had a nightmare.” Her parents would wrap her up. They’d say “Poor Jemma. Everything is okay now. We’ll keep you safe.” Jemma would believe it. She grew up fast though, and she wishes- not for the first time- that it was still acceptable for her to cry over things that she knew never happened. 

She wants to curl up and hide under her covers like she did when she was little. Things were easier to divide and pack away back then, but the more experience she gets in SHIELD the more real her dreams feel. She didn’t know what it felt like for her leg to get cut off when she was little, and so when she dreamed about it, the image scared her more than the feeling. Jemma knows more now. She knows what it feels like to be dehydrated to the brink of death. When she dreams about the end of a hot knife sliding into her shin, she can really imagine it. Her brain knows, remembers, and acts accordingly. 

Her skin tingles with some kind of phantom pain. She looks at her own body, and her scars seem to glow hot and burn with renewed pain. She marvels at the way her face twitches all of a sudden. She can feel it, but she can’t control it. Fitz lays a hesitant hand on her back- his palm open and flat and warm. He’s the anchor that keeps Jemma from floating and drifting away until she disappears. 

She does curl up into him then. She seizes up tight, knees pressed into her chest as she throws herself into that space right next to Fitz’s chest. He stills completely- unsure of what to do- but Jemma doesn’t wait for him. She yanks up the corner of his blanket and pulls until it surrounds her and everything feels and smells like him. She can’t see a single thing- every part of her body wrapped up by something and protected except for the back of her head where her hair made some sort of spectacle for Fitz to see. 

“Sorry,” she actually says it then. Jemma’s not a perfect person. It’s something she hates, but it’s something she accepts. She’s not perfect, so she says it. She knows it will make him feel worse, but she says it because she means it. Jemma’s a little selfish, and she wants him to know that she doesn’t mean to hurt him on purpose. 

It drives him like a motor. All of a sudden he goes from tense to steady. It’s such a small shift, but Jemma feels it, and she breathes it in like crisp, cool, winter air. He presses Jemma in closer to himself just the slightest bit. He returns one hand to the expanse of her back, and the other moves to tuck some of her hair behind her ear. It stays there, trembles for a second, and then it is resting on the side of her face. “It’s alright, Jemma. I don’t mind.” 

She wonders if he really means that or if he’s only saying that because she had guilted him into it with all her apologies. Fitz always had a stronger moral compass than herself- more perfect and likable in every way- so she doesn’t doubt the possibility that he was only helping and comforting her out of some imagined duty. Jemma doesn’t think she’s ever understood other people well enough to be a mastermind manipulator, but even if she is, she can’t find it in herself to feel remorseful when Fitz is touching her in all these tender ways that he never used to before. 

Her nightmares are always so nonsensical in nature- shifting from one image and scenario to another with characters transforming in roles and appearance. She relishes in the simple linear cause and effect that occurs with Fitz. He doesn’t transform from her best friend to a familiar traitor. He doesn’t slip away in a blink, and they don’t travel to different rooms when they breathe. Jemma can remember what brought her here, and he feels more solid and real than any wound inflicted upon her in her dreams. 

She finds her words then. On one deep inhale, she suddenly has her thoughts on the tip of her tongue, and on the consecutive long exhale, they tumble out of her mouth like running and jumping bunnies. “I know you must be tired. Dr. Garner’s been teaching me how to handle my anxiety, and I’m usually able to- to be fine on my own. I’m not sure what happened tonight. It just felt so real. I know it wasn’t, but I had to make sure-” Her voice is muffled against his chest and the thick blanket that separates their faces, so she doesn’t know if he understood any of that at all. His fingers catch on her hair, and she stutters for a moment before shutting up entirely. 

“Dr. Garner taught you how to handle it on your own, because you don’t accept help,” Fitz says. That’s a lie. It’s a blatant lie. Jemma knows because she’s done nothing but accept Fitz’s help ever since she’s been back, and if waking him in the middle of night to latch onto him like some leech didn’t prove it, Jemma thinks nothing will. She’s seen Daisy and Bobbi and May. They’re strong and so capable of taking care of themselves, and Jemma wants to have that same steady, selfless, sustainability, but she doesn’t even seem to know how to breathe without help most days. 

“It’s not your job to help me,” Jemma says. When she looks at Fitz, she looks at a broke man doing endless charity, and she wants Fitz to know that he doesn’t have to give her his pennies too. 

“No,” Fitz agrees, “But I want to… I like knowing you trust me- that you’ll come to me.” Jemma thinks he’s gotten the short end of the stick with that one. “I’ll keep you safe,” he whispers. Despite the fact that he’s managed it many times before, Jemma isn’t sure if she really believes that he can. She wants to, but she’s too familiar with alien viruses and curses. She’s seen too many dead bodies of old friends. On top of that, Jemma doesn’t really want him to, because Fitz goes too far. He dives into holes cut into the universe and he lets his lungs fill up with water just to keep her safe. Jemma wants him to keep himself safe too, but she knows he never will. 

“I’m sorry,” Jemma says again. She says it for a lot of reasons. She says it because he’s always done too much to help her when she’s hardly deserved it, and she says it because asks for help in the first place. She says it because she knows that this is not the first time she’s come to him for comfort, and it certainly won’t be the last. Each time, each tentative interaction, seems to ramp up in intensity and push against weakly drawn boundaries. They go from a head laid in his lap to hands intertwined to stealing his space and his air and his sleep. She knows that it’s bad, and she knows that she’ll come back for more, and she wants him to know she’s at least sorry for it. 

“There’s nothing to be sorry for.” His voice sounds so rough- like gravel or salted roads. Maybe it was the need for sleep or maybe it was the fact that Jemma was choking him and drowning him. She shuts her eyes as tight as she can and tries not to squeeze out tears onto the soft fabric of his t-shirt. She doesn’t know how he can be the source of her tears and the cure for it at the same time. 

She’s never had such blurry lines in her life before. Jemma’s always tried to keep things where they belonged, keeping lines clear and organized in her mind, but with Fitz it’s harder. It’s difficult to tell what is right and wrong, what touches are okay and which are too much, what Jemma’s allowed to ask for and what’s unreasonable, where her friendship with him ended and where romantic attraction began. She doesn’t know if the love she feels when he wraps her up so perfectly with a ribbon is born from a platonic or romantic basis, and she wonders if it could possibly be both. All she knows is that one day, she woke up knowing she loved him in the same way she knew the chemical properties of hydrogen, the same way she knew where the freckles on her sternum ended, and the same way she knew her last name was Simmons. For that reason, she can’t look back and pinpoint the moment she knew, and suddenly it felt like she always had. 

Jemma knows she feels loved, and all she wants is to be well enough to love him back the way he deserves to be loved. She wants more gentle touches and whispered nights. She wants to wake up before the sun begins to rise, and she wants to go back to sleep with the knowledge that he is safe next to her. She thinks she wants more than that too. She wants calloused fingers dancing across her skin and no ulterior motives- words exchanged without concern for their unintended implications. She wants more and more and more. She wants to consume him entirely- everything he could ever be willing to give her- and she’d thank him for every piece of charity, every penny she receives. It feels like an evil thought, but Jemma wants him to consume her too- her shaky hands and damaged goods. Maybe when she is better she can give him more than that. (She can give him steady palms cradling an unsure face, and she can give him back all the fight he had given her.) She knows that she cannot give him more than her sleepless nights for now, and she knows it’s not as good as the things he gives her, but she hopes he takes it anyways, because Jemma will give him anything she can. 

Fitz is still tracing lazy little circles into her shoulder, and they get messier and lighter with every breath they share. Jemma knows he’s waiting for her to fall asleep first. She tries to let herself go. It’s barely anything, certainly not enough to balance the scales, but she at least tries to make his job easier- give him what she can. 

And she does. Soon enough, Jemma falls into some semblance of sleep and when she wakes up feeling sick and uneasy- barely able to grasp onto any thread of her dream but still feeling the residual fear- she wriggles out of the protective cocoon she’s built herself. She watches the rise and fall of Fitz’s chest, the curve of his nose, the part of his chapped lips, a chipped tooth… She thinks more. She wants more.

**Author's Note:**

> Thank you so much for reading! Every kudos and comment is extremely appreciated! <3


End file.
